> things that cannot be expressed that way tend to not be a good fit for GPU computing anyway

I'll have to disagree with you a little bit here. SIMT model of GPUs are quiet a bit more expressive than the numpy's SIMD model. As an obvious example, you'll have to manually maintain a mask to implement if/else i.e. code path divergence in SIMD. GPUs automatically does this and many more to make your life easier. And frankly, I find it lot more easier to reason about what should happen to one data point than a bunch of them together.

An interesting article I read recently that has some relevance to this discussion. https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/18/ispc-origins